by Лорен Уиллиг
Once we got untangled, I hugged her back, marveling, as always, at the fragility of the bones beneath the expensive cashmere. I didn’t think I’d ever seen Serena in anything but cashmere. It was as though, lacking proper padding of her own, she needed the extra insulation.
Next to us, stepfather/cousin and stepson/cousin marked their dual relationship with the briefest of all possible handshakes.
Colin’s mother’s husband treated us all to a broad, open smile. The sort you see on televangelists and traveling salesmen. I could hear the slap of flesh on flesh as his palm met Colin’s. “Colin.”
Colin’s answering smile was decidedly anemic. “Jeremy,” he said, without enthusiasm.
“Hi,” I said, sticking out a hand. “I’m Eloise Kelly.”
I was tempted to add “Colin’s girlfriend,” but I wasn’t quite sure if we were at the public declaration stage yet.
“Colin’s girlfriend!” chimed in Serena.
Well, there was that, then.
Did it count as meeting the parents when it was a stepfather? A stepfather who was also a cousin? I decided not.
Jeremy favored us with an isn’t-that-sweet look. “Your first Valentine’s Day together?” he said in a knowing way that made Colin stiffen like a shrinky dink in a hot oven.
“Well, you know, it’s Presidents’ Day that really counts, but you have to make do with what you have,” I said flippantly, just to say something, before Colin turned entirely to stone like the children in the wicked witch’s garden.
I just hoped he wouldn’t ask me what or when Presidents’ Day was. Ivy League universities tend not to break for national holidays, so I’d lost all sense of when most of them were. And I’d been pretending to be English for so long, I’d lost track of my own history. I had a vague idea that Presidents’ Day was in January or February and was something to do with Lincoln’s birthday, but I wouldn’t have been prepared to swear to that. If he wanted to know the regnal dates of any British monarch, on the other hand, I was his girl.
“Where are you from, Eloise?” Jeremy asked.
I noted the deliberate use of my name. Very smooth. Not smooth in a sketchy way, but smooth in the way of Ivy League administrators, politicians, and nonprofit fundraisers, peoples used to shmoozing and being shmoozed, where their charm, not their faces, are the deciding factor in their fortune’s.
“I should have thought that Presidents’ Day reference would have given me away,” I said. “America. New York.”
“Where in New York?”
Oh, we were playing that game, were we? Fortunately, it was a game I knew how to play and played well. You don’t grow up in New York without learning how to play the pecking order game.
“Manhattan,” I said sweetly. “Upper East Side.”
Colin’s stepfather nodded, as though I had given the correct answer in an oral exam. I could see myself being moved from one mental category to another. “Do you know — ,” he said, and began listing names.
I didn’t. But I let him go on anyway, while I made my own mental categorizations. Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s prodigal grandson was definitely what Pammy would call a “smootharse.” Too smooth. He was all polish with no contrast, all gloss with no texture. His clothes were perfectly chosen and perfectly maintained, not a stray thread or old stain showing anywhere. His hair was as glossy as Serena’s and what lines there were on his face looked like they’d been mapped out by a designer, the modern male equivalent of the beauty patches once worn by eighteenth-century lovelies to draw attention to their charms. Even his speech had been perfected down to the last little nuance. Not too posh, since that would be a social solecism of its own, but just posh enough. Posh enough to sound like he was deliberately trying not to be posh, which is its own sort of bizarre status symbol.
Wishing I had paid more attention, I remembered Colin’s father as I had seen him in those pictures in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s album. For all that they were cousins, you really couldn’t get more of a contrast. Colin’s father had had a craggy sort of face. Not craggy in terms of irregularity of feature, but craggy as in lived-in. Broken in. Comfortable. Like an old Barbour jacket.
“Sorry,” I said, shaking my head as he named a famous gallery about ten blocks from my parents’ apartment. “I’ve walked past it, but I’ve never been inside. My family aren’t really art collectors.”
“Next time you’re in New York, let me know, and I can arrange a private viewing for you,” Jeremy offered magnanimously.
The “we aren’t art collectors” clearly hadn’t registered. I suppose, in a field like art sales, you had to be impervious to rejection. If you battered away long enough, odds were that you could talk someone into buying.
But it wasn’t just that. He struck me as the sort who likes to make a splash, who likes to be in a position to offer favors — even if, in my case, the recipient had no interest in the favor whatsoever. Jeremy still got to make a point of showing that he could. It was another one of those pecking-order games.
Despite the fact that I had been roped into the game as his straight man, Mutt to his Jeff, Elvis to his Costello, I didn’t think the performance was aimed at me. Nor was it being staged on Serena’s behalf. For all that Jeremy oozed charm in her direction, there was something offhanded about it, more habit than design. Serena wasn’t the target either. Colin was.
And Colin wasn’t playing.
Having exhausted my limited knowledge of New York galleries, Jeremy transferred his attention to Serena. “Will I see you in March?” he asked.
Visibly uncomfortable, Serena shrugged her shoulders slightly in lieu of an answer. I could see the sharp bones of her clavicle through the soft fabric of her dress.
“March is a busy season for us,” she offered, in what was clearly the first stage of a long and elaborate attempt at evasion. A simple no would have been far more effective.
“I’ll have a word with Adam,” said Jeremy kindly. “I’m sure we can get it sorted.”
I presumed Adam must be Serena’s boss. It also seemed very obvious that she didn’t want whatever it was sorted, but she managed a sickly smile. “Thank you.”
“Of course. Your mother would be very sorry not to see you.”
Oh, boy. More family drama. I couldn’t blame Serena for looking slightly green. I would be green, too, if someone nearer in age to me than my mother presumed to speak to me on her behalf.
Jeremy turned back to me. “Will we see you, too, Eloise?”
He was probably trying to be nice. But that “we” pissed me off on Colin’s behalf. It wasn’t his place to be inviting me to whatever this March thing was if Colin hadn’t. And Colin hadn’t. I chose not to dwell on that bit. It was far simpler and easier to be irked at his stepfather instead.
I twinkled sweetly up at Colin’s mother’s husband. “Will you speak to my boss, too?”
That had not been in the script. Jeremy mustered an uncomfortable laugh. “I’ll have to leave that to Colin,” he said a little too heartily, before adding, with an admonitory nod to Colin, “Make sure he tells you all the details.”
“Don’t worry, Jeremy,” said Colin dryly. “I will.”
Showing more gumption than I had given her credit for, Serena seized her moment. “Will you excuse me?” she said. There were two bright spots of color high on her cheeks. “I have to coordinate with the caterers.”
“I have to be off, too,” said her stepfather. I had a feeling that if she had said that she had an emergency operation, he would have had a bigger one. “I promised Adam I’d give him my assessment of those new bronzes.”
“Don’t let us keep you, then,” said Colin pleasantly.
“Colin.” In reverse of their greeting, like a tape unwinding backwards, Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s grandson nodded to his stepson before sending a practiced smile my way. “A pleasure, Eloise.”
“Likewise!” I chimed.
As he turned away, his smiled seemed to hover behind him, like the Cheshire cat’s. His t
eeth were very, very white. That, I have learned, is not normally the case across the Pond. He must have gotten them capped. I wondered if Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had paid for it.
As I watched, Jeremy hailed Serena’s boss. At least, I assumed that was who the other man must be. Unlike Jeremy’s perfect dental apparatus, he was bucktoothed, and his jacket was tweed over a black turtleneck, rather than an Italian tailored suit, but there was a certain similarity of expression, nonetheless. They were happily smarming away for all they were worth. That should keep him occupied for a while. Serena had gone to ground, not with the caterers, but with Nick and Pammy. I was pleased to see that Nick had slung an arm around Serena’s shoulders. Not a particularly demonstrative arm, but an arm nonetheless. Of course, he had been squeezing Pammy’s waist earlier in the evening, so it was hard to read too much into it. The main point was that she had a buffer zone.
We hadn’t said hi to either Nick or Pammy yet, or to Joan Plowden-Plugge, who was still roaming about like a wicked witch in search of a flying monkey. But I had had enough. I wanted to go home. I had a million questions to ask, none of which could effectively be dealt with in a room full of people. Especially when some of those people were the very people I wanted to talk about.
“So what’s this March thing?” I asked in a falsely casual tone.
“My mother’s birthday.” Colin traded his empty glass for a full one. He offered it to me first. I shook my head. I felt befuddled enough without muddling myself further with a third glass of bubbly. “She’s invited us to Paris for a long weekend. Jeremy wants us all to play one big happy family.”
“Oh,” I said. It was my word of the night. And then, because I couldn’t help myself, “How did — ?”
I didn’t have to finish the sentence. “My mother wind up with him?” he finished for me.
I nodded. “Pretty much.”
Colin let out a gusty exhalation, that was probably meant to convey something to me, but didn’t. He stared for a very long time at the bronze on its own square stand in front of us. If one didn’t know better, the concerned squint could have been taken as the concentration of a serious connoisseur. I had a feeling it wasn’t the bronze he was seeing, though.
After a prolonged scrutiny, he finally said, “I suppose it was natural. My father was ill. My mother was much younger. Jeremy was there.”
That wasn’t exactly what I would call natural, but if it made Colin feel better, I wasn’t going to argue.
“Your parents married pretty young, didn’t they?” I said by means of encouragement. What I really wanted to know was how he felt about all this. But as stupid as I can be about boys, I did know one thing; direct questions about emotions are the fastest way to the end of a conversation.
“My mother was young,” Colin corrected.
“How big an age difference was there between them?” I asked, reassuring myself that, yes, Colin and I were only three years apart and that couldn’t really be accounted much of anything as far as age differences go.
He had to pause for a minute to do the mental math. “Fifteen — no. Sixteen years.”
“Eeeek,” I said before adding, inconsequentially, “My parents are six months apart. They went to college together.”
“My father had already been through university and the army when he met my mother,” said Colin. “She was sixteen.”
I couldn’t think of anything to say other than another eek, so I didn’t say anything at all.
Colin rubbed a tired hand over his forehead. Fortunately, it wasn’t the hand holding the champagne, or that could have gotten very messy. I’ve done that sort of thing before. “I think she thought he was . . . oh, a sort of James Bond. When all he really wanted to do was settle down and be a farmer. So it was something of a disaster.”
I felt a slight chill go through me at that James Bond bit, in spite of the heat generated by the press of too many bodies in too small a space. Not so very long ago, I had gotten myself in trouble with my suspicions about Colin’s own . . . well, shall we call them extracurricular activities? He claimed to be writing spy novels, but I still had my suspicions.
But I would have dated him anyway, I told myself. It wasn’t just the James Bond thing.
Okay, maybe it had been, just a little bit, in the beginning. It had been his ancestors, his Englishness, all those external aspects that had initially attracted my interest. Well, and a certain amount of very evident physical chemistry. But it had been long enough now that those weren’t the reasons I stayed. If it were just the accent, or just the titillation of dating a descendant of one of my favorite spies, it would have been easy to call it quits. When it came down to it, I just plain liked him. I couldn’t even quite say why.
Why do we ever like anyone? Why does one couple click and another not? It’s never neatly reducible to a checklist of quantifiable items, no matter how hard we try to parse it out for the benefit of interested friends and parents. Or even for ourselves. I just knew that I enjoyed being with him. I knew that it made me happier when I saw his number pop up on my cell phone screen. I liked the smell of his aftershave. I liked the way he grinned when I said something that amused him. The idea of Colin as James Bond had been titillating, but I’d be just as happy to take him as a gentleman farmer — so long as he didn’t expect me to have anything to do with the livestock.
Fortunately, Colin was too busy dealing with his parents to notice my momentary spasm of guilt-induced soul-searching.
Sixteen. Wow. It boggled the brain. Even if they hadn’t gotten married till she was eighteen . . . that was still an eighteen-year-old married to a thirty-four-year-old. No wonder the marriage had failed. From what Mrs. Selwick-Alderly had said, she didn’t think much of Colin’s mother. But you had to wonder what Colin’s father had been thinking, too. At thirty-four, shouldn’t he have known better?
“So your father got ill. And then Jeremy came along,” I said carefully.
“Yes.” With an obvious effort at fairness, Colin said, “He and my mother are much better suited than she and my father ever were.”
“And just think — you keep it all in the family!” I said cheerfully.
A ragged laugh ripped out of Colin’s throat. “Are you sorry you got yourself involved in all this?”
Leaning against his side, I looked up at him, as though there were only us in that whole, overcrowded space. “I didn’t get myself involved in all this. I got myself involved in you. And, no, I’m not sorry.”
His hand closed convulsively over mine. “Let’s go home,” he said.
“What about Serena?”
Colin’s eyes pressed briefly shut. When he opened them, he said resolutely, “She’ll be fine. It is her party, after all. Unless you want to stay?”
I shook my head. “No.”
I knew exactly what I wanted to do with the remains of my Valentine’s Day, and it didn’t have anything to do with pink champagne or papier-mâché Cupids. I leaned my head against Colin’s shoulder, the lacy sleeves of my dress whispering against his jacket.
“Let’s go get some grilled cheese,” I said.
Historical Note
The Napoleonic Wars had a seminal impact on the creation of British India, that is, British India as depicted in M. M. Kaye novels and BBC miniseries. At the turn of the nineteenth century, British influence in India was still a patchwork sort of affair, acquired by accident and administered ad hoc. The East India Company had acquired some areas by conquest and others by grant from the Moghul Emperors, but large chunks of territory were still outside their jurisdiction. British influence was concentrated around the presidency towns of Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay. Some areas were entirely free from British influence, while others were technically independent, but had signed treaties ceding territory or other concessions in exchange for British military protection.
As if it weren’t complicated enough already, Parliament stuck its finger into the pie, subjecting the governance of the East India Company’s Indian territor
ies to the oversight of a London-based Board of Control, headed by the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In practice, great power was wielded by the Governor General, appointed by the East India Company, but subject to removal by the Crown. The man on the spot, the Governor General had the power to implement legislation, wage war, and make treaties. In 1804, that man was Lord Wellesley, older brother of the future Duke of Wellington, and prime mover behind the series of conflicts that consolidated British influence in India.
If Lord Wellesley saw Frenchmen under the bed, he did have some reason for it. Not only was Bonaparte’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 seen as a threat, but French generals throughout India planted liberty trees, led troops into battle under the tricolore , and cooked up elaborate schemes to unite the French forces in India against the British so that the French influence might reign supreme in the East. In 1802, General Perron, in the nominal employ of the Mahratta chieftain, Scindia, went so far as to write Bonaparte for French troops to deploy against the British. He got them, too, a whole boatload of them, although they were sent packing before they reached their destination. General Perron, by the way, is not to be confused with yet another contemporary Frenchman, Jean-Pierre Piron, who was General Raymond’s successor as commander of the French force in Hyderabad in the period just prior to this book. Both Perron and Piron were rabid French nationalists and both get a mention in this book but, I promise, they really were two different people, not just a typo. You can chalk the similarity in their names down to yet another dastardly French plot to sow confusion (or just an accident of birth and geography).
Lord Wellesley used the French threat as part of his rationale for incursions against local rulers, radically expanding the scope of British oversight in India, a policy of which the East Company directors back in London did not approve. For more on Wellesley, Wellington, and the Mahratta Wars, I recommend Jac Weller’s Wellington in India , which lays out the day-to-day military situation, including the fighting in the north alluded to during Penelope’s stay in Calcutta, as well as the tantalizing tale of the treasure of Berar, rumored lost during the siege of Gawilighur and never found.
